Hospital staff, including nurses and other caregivers, are generally required to provide periodic follow-up visits to each patient being treated during their daily “rounds.” However, due to the busy hospital environment, caregivers often become involved with other urgent tasks and are distracted from their rounds. As a result, the caregiver may not follow up with the patient in a timely manner, which may lead to a lapse in critical care required by the patient. In addition, electronic monitoring, diagnostic, and communication devices that generate various audible tones or sounds are ubiquitous in the hospital environment. Due to the quantity and nature of such sounds, hospital staff, including caregivers, are likely to become desensitized to these sounds, and as a result, audible prompts to gain the attention of a caregiver are largely disregarded. Thus, it would be desirable to have an alert device to visually remind the caregiver that his or her rounds period has expired or is nearing expiration.
Additionally, other circumstances exist in which the monitoring of the progressive expiration of a predetermined time interval is critical in the achievement of a successful result. For example, in the case of food preparation, chefs, cooks, and other food preparers are required to continuously monitor the cooking of various types of food, each of which may be at various stages of completion. For example, an individual may be baking a cake, cooking pasta, and marinating beef simultaneously and as such, must remember to periodically return to or follow up with each food item in order to ensure that it is not over prepared. While timers provided by the various equipment can be used to notify the individual when a predetermined time period has expired, such indications are generally audible in nature and can be easily drowned out by the ambient noise in a kitchen, resulting in a lapse in the monitoring of the food, which may result in its overcooking. Thus, it would be advantageous to have an alert device that visually reminds an individual of the progressive expiration of a predetermined cooking time to avoid the overcooking of food.
Therefore, there is a need for a visible alert device that provides a visual indicator to remind a caregiver of the need to attend to his or her patient. Additionally, there is a need for a visible alert device that visually represents multiple levels of priority associated with predetermined time periods.